Not your ordinary mountain music

A lute player, an Inuit throat singer, and a punk rocker walk into a bar in Knoxville, Tennessee … That’s not a joke. Actually, it’s the setup for Big Ears, a music and arts festival making global waves with its no-holds-barred staging of what its organizers call the “indefinable avant-garde.” As for the punchline? One of the world’s most high-concept cultural experiences takes place right here in a relatively isolated city in the foothills of the Smokies.

Throughout the weekend-long festival, which returns to downtown Knoxville this March 27-29, music, art, and film merge and multiply in power as genres interweave and dissipate. True to its Big Ears name, the festival presents artists who demand thoughtful listening—whether it’s a matter of discerning the message in a wall of distortion, the soul layered in a tape loop, or the precision of a symphonic crescendo. Boomer legends jam with Brooklyn hipsters. Minimalism meets rock bravado. Classical collides with folk. Museum galleries entertain thrash metal. Japanese urbanites mingle with local street buskers. Iconoclasts are welcomed as insiders. 

If all goes according to plan, audiences will leave Big Ears with their minds opened, blown, boggled—and everything in between. It’s apt to get a little weird at times, but that’s just how the global intelligentsia who convene here like it. 

Big Ears, Big Ambitions

The brainchild of Knoxville native Ashley Capps and his music promotion company, AC Entertainment, Big Ears has established itself as a tour de force since debuting in 2009. As the co-producers of the Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival in Manchester, Tennessee—an anchor of the summer festival season, with up to 100,000 annual attendees—AC Entertainment knows a thing or two about building buzz. When the lineup hit the Internet this past fall, the New York Times wrote that “downtown, in the musical sense, seems to be expanding southward,” comparing the Big Ears 2015 programming to a “season listing for Greenwich Village and Brooklyn, compressed into a single weekend.” 

The prolific Kronos Quartet holds court as this year’s artists in residence, themselves an embodiment of the festival’s exploratory credo. For the past 40 years, the San Francisco-based string quartet has released more than 50 albums that skewer and reinvent genres, its contemporary sound as steeped in Béla Bartók as it is in Jimi Hendrix. The 2015 lineup is stacked with other visionaries: performance artist Laurie Anderson, rock guitarists such as Wilco’s Nels Cline and the National’s Bryce Dessner, composers Terry Riley and Max Richter, the Knoxville Symphony Orchestra and jazz trio The Bad Plus, folk singers Sam Amidon and Rhiannon Giddens and many more.

A mix of big names and more obscure artists, the lineup avoids obvious boundaries while celebrating a diversity of discovery. “Seeing the look on people’s faces and hearing them talk about an amazing artist they’d just seen that they hadn’t heard of before they came to town is richly rewarding,” Capps said.

Part and parcel of the Big Ears mission is also the way careful curation makes way for in-the-moment collaboration. Last year, Mark Ribot’s guitar line riffed over Charlie Chaplin’s The Kid, at once reframing the silent classic and becoming completely absorbed by it. With Andy Warhol’s 1960s screen tests as their backdrop, husband-and-wife indie rockers Dean Wareham and Britta Phillips performed The Velvet Underground’s “Not a Young Man Anymore” while a young Lou Reed sipped out of a glass Coke bottle, earning an outbreak of applause from the rapt audience. 

And at the culminating performance of Big Ears 2014, guitarist Jonny Greenwood of mega-group Radiohead took the stage at Knoxville’s landmark Tennessee Theatre for an ambient-rock take on minimalist composer Steve Reich’s “Electric Counterpoint.” Next came the New York-based Ensemble Signal’s performance of Reich’s 1976 masterpiece, “Music for 18 Musicians,” a hypnotic pulsation of pianos, marimbas, xylophones, clarinets, strings and voices. A final bow by Reich himself capped off the weekend.

All a Matter of Context 

An Appalachian theater known best for its original Mighty Wurlitzer pipe organ may seem like an unlikely centerpiece of a pioneering music festival of international prominence. “An element of surprise is important to me,” Capps said. “That an event with this type of cutting-edge artistic character is taking place outside the major cultural centers—in a small town in the South—enables it to have a presence and a profile that might be more difficult to create in a larger city where cultural events like this are more of a common part of the fabric.”

That’s not just lip service. Rolling Stone has praised the festival as “arguably the classiest, most diverse festival in the country” as well as “the most ambitious avant-garde festival to emerge in America in more than a decade.” Capps and downtown advocates say that the festival’s rising star puts the spotlight on Knoxville’s walkable core as well as its homegrown cultural community. 

“When we announced this destination, especially early on, people were like, ‘Why the hell is that happening in Knoxville?’” Capps said. “Getting people to Knoxville is one of the initial hurdles, from a marketing perspective, but it’s wonderful that, after spending a weekend here, it becomes one of the things they talk about most, because they love the character and experience of being in the city.”

The quality of the festival venues play a key role in that impression. Since the Tennessee Theatre first opened as a cinema in 1928, Glenn Miller, Kenny Rogers, Patricia Neal, Bob Dylan, and B.B. King have darkened its door. In the Tennessee’s turn as a Big Ears venue, Rolling Stone writer and Knoxville resident Matt Hendrickson wrote that the setting is “like watching a show inside a Faberge egg.” New York Times critic Ben Ratliff called the space “a palace as big as an ocean liner, where sound reveals itself naturally and precisely” in his 2014 review.

In addition to the Tennessee Theatre, Big Ears takes over the 750-seat Bijou Theatre, an historic landmark that sits just a couple of blocks away and had its first heyday in the 1870s as a hotel. President Rutherford Hayes once gave a speech from its balcony. In the era after reopening as a theater in 1909, vaudeville shows kept its seats filled with both black and white patrons, then a rarity. In the decades since, the site has hosted everything from a fruit stand and used car lot to an adult movie house and burlesque stage. In 2006, the Bijou unveiled an extensive renovation. AC Entertainment manages its programming as well as that of the Tennessee—a business arrangement that was another major part of Capps’ decision to locate the festival in Knoxville. “The Tennessee and the Bijou theaters are beautiful, extraordinary places to experience concerts and are especially appropriate for a lot of the music we bring to Big Ears,” Capps said. 

Performances also happen in intimate downtown music venues such as the Square Room as well as the nearby Knoxville Museum of Art. There’s a smile in museum director David Butler’s voice when he talks about the festival and the way it has stoked Knoxville’s cultural energy. “When Big Ears first started off, none of us really knew what was going to happen or that it would be as big a thing as it was—sure, it sounded like fun,” Butler recalled. Last year’s festival doubled as a housewarming party for the newly renovated museum, with the packed opening night taking place under internationally renowned Knoxville glass artist Richard Jolley’s massive, DNA-like installation, suspended like a celestial thought bubble above the crowd. 

“At a stroke we became a place that mattered on an international scale, in terms of new music and interesting things that important artists are doing around the world that manifest themselves here for that long weekend,” Butler said. “Just by taking place here, Big Ears enhances other programs we’re doing locally and pulls up the level of everything.”

Michele Hummel, the director of the Knoxville Central Business Improvement District Management Corporation, credits the influx of visitors with bringing marked vitality to town. During last year’s festival, downtown Knoxville swarmed with nearly 2,000 daily attendees. Some 65 percent of festival attendees came from more than 100 miles away, according to Hummel, which lead to sold-out downtown hotels and packed restaurants. “From an anecdotal perspective, I heard from one downtown restaurant that he cracked more eggs that morning than he had the whole time having his restaurant open,” added Hummel.

It’s no wonder the downtown business community rallied to revive Big Ears when the festival took a three-year hiatus after the 2010 festival. With a stated goal of expanding minds and experiences in Knoxville, the Aslan Foundation stepped up to underwrite last year’s event through the Knoxville Central Business Improvement District. Following the successful return of the festival, the Aslan Foundation has pledged its continued support to the tune of $900,000 spread out over the next three years.

“We felt the event was so unique to the evolving character of Knoxville as an arts and cultural hub that it was important to bring back the festival,” said Jeffrey Mansour,  executive director of the grantmaker. “It’s such an eclectic mix of music that to make it more profitable would have harmed that uniqueness. We didn’t want to fund just another run-of-the-mill music festival but something special that would raise the profile of Knoxville as a community and broaden and deepen the quality of musical expression here.” 

Mansour believes the foundation’s financial support allows the festival’s bottom line to be about benefiting the community, which in turn helps bridge cultural divides between visitors and residents. “You’d see these urban hipsters all dressed in black and they’re standing there talking to a family playing bluegrass busking at Market Square, just relating to each other as musicians or music lovers,” he said. “I think we destroyed a lot of stereotypes.”

Creative Commons

The compact nature of downtown Knoxville lends an intimacy that goes hand in hand with the Big Ears experience. “Venues, hotels, restaurants and retail stores are within short walking distance,” Capps said. “That to me is an essential quality in creating a festival such as this, so everyone is coming together for a shared purpose. There’s a real spirit of camaraderie and shared exploration.”

Sam Amidon, a progressive folk singer returning to Big Ears 2015 after an appearance in the 2010 edition, describes the Knoxville festival as a more authentic artistic experience, thanks in part to that village-like feel of the city. “In the summer especially, musicians go to a lot of festivals in a row and will see everybody and have time for three-minute conversations, then you see them the next weekend and pick up two more sentences,” Amidon said. “With Big Ears, it’s more of a weekend; musicians actually interact and hear each other’s sets. Instead of feeling like a conference where you’re rushing around, there are more genuine interactions.” 

Capps intends for Big Ears 2015 to delve even deeper into Knoxville’s cultural fabric—from “secret,” last-minute shows at offbeat sites to a showpiece collaboration with the Knoxville Symphony Orchestra. In addition, this year a portion of each ticket sold will benefit music and arts education programs at Knoxville’s Joy of Music School and Community School of the Arts, and students will have the chance to get involved with workshops and rehearsals. “The evolution is aimed at strengthening our ties in the community as well as the community’s experience of the festival,” Capps said. 

Even so, not everyone in Knoxville has jumped on the Big Ears bandwagon. A couple of alternative events—or rebel festivals, depending on who you ask—emerged last year to showcase local talent. Hello City bills itself as “an indigenous companion” to Big Ears and last year brought four days of performances, DJ sets, and a gear show to art galleries and the Pilot Light, an experimental independent venue in Knoxville’s Old City.

Appalachian Roots

Though Big Ears has built a reputation for the way it eschews labels, this year’s lineup makes a point to celebrate at least one distinction: its Appalachian underpinning. Folk music has always had a spot at Big Ears, but this year Capps has placed particular emphasis on traditional Appalachian influences. In fact, he found early inspiration for Big Ears at a new-wave music festival he attended several years ago, called Punkt, in a small sea town on the southern tip of Norway. Ground-breaking electronic music took center stage, but Capps walked away most struck by fiddle player Nils Økland’s interpretation of traditional Norwegian folk songs. 

“For me, any great festival creates or celebrates a sense of place,” Capps said. “With exploratory music it can be useful to acknowledge and highlight its roots. Appalachian traditional music, which of course goes back to the music of the British Isles, is an enormously influential cultural force.”

The Kronos Quartet will draw from folk influences throughout the weekend, and performances by folk artists Sam Amidon as well as Rhiannon Giddens will further surface the Appalachian angle. Both as a founding member of Grammy-winning old-time revivalists Carolina Chocolate Drops and as a solo artist, Giddens explores the vital but oft-forgotten role African-American performers have played in the folk music heritage of North and South Carolina. The Carolina Chocolate Drops grew out of jam sessions with old-time fiddler Joe Thompson, and Giddens says that mountain balladry seeps into everything she does. “My set will be wide-ranging—from Appalachian love songs to country laments to jazz ballads to work songs to rock ‘n’ roll gospel to Gaelic mouth music,” she said. “We will be touching on many different aspects of what makes up American music.”

The collaborative spirit of Big Ears flows through Amidon’s Appalachian-inspired music, which is forged through a symbiotic relationship between ancestral hymns and tunes and radical reinterpretations. When Amidon sings a folk song, it becomes a platform for storytelling as well as experimental composition; the result manages to be rooted in heritage while simultaneously detached from time.

“Great material came out of those mountains,” said Amidon, who grew up in the Vermont end of the Appalachian Mountains and plays fiddle, banjo and guitar. “These mysterious folk songs have been passed from one person to the next in an era before we had recording devices; the next guy who sang it probably forgot two of the verses so he wrote two of his own. The cultural process that creates this music is not the result of one person’s idea; it’s this weird hybrid beast, and yet these songs have incredible truths to them, mysterious plot twists and strange encounters.”

Echoes of Black Mountain 

A gathering of the vanguard in Southern Appalachia, where lines between art forms are blurred, redrawn and then exploded? If the formula sounds like a second coming of Black Mountain College and its legendary Happenings, that’s purely coincidental. Yet a certain spiritual connection is hard to ignore. 

Capps admits that he wasn’t trying to invoke Black Mountain or its legacy when he dreamed up Big Ears. “But there are some interesting parallels in the sense that these young, cutting-edge artists came together in a very unlikely location, the mountains of western North Carolina,” he says. “I’m sure gatherings like that happened all the time in New York, but because people were outside a major cultural center and they were together in this unexpected environment—which opens people up to new collaborations and experiences—it gave them the ability to explore connections in their own way.”

In fact, this past fall the Brooklyn Academy of Music staged a tribute to Black Mountain College’s “spirit of radical democracy” in the form of a choral and visual collaboration called “Black Mountain Songs.” Capps attended the performance and, in the excitement of the moment, sent out a missive on Twitter for Big Ears fans to take note. 

“After the performance, I was floating on a cloud. It was a powerful experience,” Capps says. “In so many ways, the piece crystallizes what the Big Ears concept is all about—bringing together poetry, visual arts, dance, music, folk music, classical music, with this rich sense of history and complete sense of now.”